In an identifier (ID) based communication structure in which an ID and a locator are separated, a principal communication agent may perform communication by designating not an IP address but the identifier of a communication target without regarding networking related contents including an address, transport characteristics, and the like. In this case, in the ID based communication structure, an ID/locator mapping system providing mapping the locator for a location to a target ID is present, a location of the target ID is acquired through the ID/locator mapping system, and routing and forwarding for the target ID are performed based thereon to transport data.
In an IP based communication structure, the flow control and error control take place in the both side of hosts because the IP addresses are bound to the network interface of each host.
However, in ID based networking, a receiver side requests the content which is identified by its ID. In this situation, the actual location of content is not determined until the request has been made. Besides, multiple copies of the contents may be present in different locations and contents may be possible to move from one location to another location during the transportation of contents. So, the legacy transport control scheme is not appropriate in the ID/locator separation structure.